


Lifeline

by DarlaBlack



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst with a Happy Ending, Episode: s09e16 William, F/M, Season/Series 09
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-24
Updated: 2019-11-24
Packaged: 2021-02-26 06:40:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,125
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21539158
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DarlaBlack/pseuds/DarlaBlack
Summary: She’s coming apart so he’s coming to get her.
Relationships: Fox Mulder/Dana Scully
Comments: 17
Kudos: 115





	Lifeline

Blood on the crib sheet, blood on her baby’s head. How many times will they hurt him in his own nursery? How many times can she do this? She hasn’t slept in 36 hours and she can’t keep her own child safe.

William cries and cries while she clings to his blue bunny hat, helpless in this sterile space. Mulder in the hospital was awful; this is unbearable.

The doctor tells her, as so many have before, that her baby is fine. But things could have been different. She did not keep him safe.

_Look at me. Look what they did. Is this what you want for your son?_

The words echo for hours, that raspy voice. How easily she had been manipulated. Scully does not trust herself, watching her smiling child who looks at her with open love and no reason to doubt. _You’re wrong to love me_ , she thinks to him.

She cannot be trusted.

She cannot be trusted with a child.

Scully comes apart in his nursery, in the same clothes she’s been wearing since she sang to him in the car with no cares but that it was past his bedtime. She stands in the place where she could have lost her baby twice now. She thinks this child would be better off without her. She understands that she deserves to be alone.

—

“Look, I told her not to do anything, not to talk to anyone yet, but you need to get to Mulder. Get him to come back here _now_.” Monica Reyes is nearly shouting into her phone, her patience running thin. She caught that child as he came into this world, and she won’t see him sent away without a fight.

“Listen, lady, I told you we don’t know where he is.” Frohike’s voice also seems impatient, but she senses there’s something he’s holding back. “I haven’t seen him in months. No one knows where he is.” She catches it this time, a kind of verbal wink, and she pulls back.

“Okay,” she says. “Okay, I’m sorry. I’ll keep trying through official channels.”

“You do that. And don’t call here again!”

He hangs up and she puts her own phone away. She looks up at the window to Dana Scully’s apartment where the other woman paces, casting shadows on the curtains. Dana refuses to sleep, but Monica will stay with her tonight. She’ll keep watch, and she’ll call Skinner if she has to. That baby isn’t going anywhere.

—

At six the next morning, Scully is curled around William in her bed, clutching him as they both doze, her lips pressed to his fuzzy head. At the sound of the front door opening, she jerks awake fully, a reflex of panic forcing her upright. She lifts William to her chest and ducks down beside the bed, holding him against her, grateful for his silence in sleep.

A soft knock on her door. “Dana.”

Reyes’s voice. Still, Scully doesn’t move, tucked between her bed and dresser.

The knock again. “Dana, can I come in?”

After a moment, Scully realizes what she’s doing, feels foolish, and stands. She hesitates, but moves to unlock her door. Reyes is there, as she expected, but so is Melvin Frohike.

“Hey, there’s that kiddo,” he says, bopping William’s sock-covered foot. He seeks out her eyes, concerned. “You okay?”

Scully tries not to cry, but feels the tears welling anyway. She nods. “Yeah,” she says. “Fine.”

Frohike gives her a scrutinizing look and nods like he doesn’t quite believe it. He says nothing, reaches into his pocket instead. “Got something for ya.” It’s a phone, small and gray and indistinct, perhaps a little rough around the edges, with nicks in its plastic casing like it’s been pried apart more than a few times. “When this rings, you answer it, okay? Should be in the next five minutes or so.”

Scully takes the phone from him without question. Frohike and Monica exchange a glance—worried, she thinks, but can’t work up the motivation to reassure them. William stirs and she adjusts his weight in her arms, rubbing his back, kissing the top of his head.

“Well,” the man says. “I guess I’ll head out. When he wakes up, tell the kid I said hi.”

Scully nods and watches as he turns to go. Belatedly, she calls out, “Thank you,” though she isn’t sure yet what for.

Monica tells her, “I’ll make some coffee,” and leaves for the kitchen.

Scully closes the door again and locks it. She lays William on the bed—still rosy-cheeked and snoozing—and sits beside him watching his tiny chest move up and down in sleep. She puts her hand on his belly, feels the flutter of his heartbeat. The phone surprises her when it rings. Its chirping is unfamiliar, and she presses the answer button quickly, lest it wake the baby.

Hesitant, she speaks into the receiver: “H-hello?”

“Scully? Dana?”

The room spins and she’s grateful to be sitting on the bed. She’s woozy at the sound, unbelieving. The tears are back, pressing at her eyelids, and she’s sure she can’t breathe. “Mulder?” Her voice emerges too high.

“It’s me,” he says. “I can’t talk long.” There’s a muttered _shit_ , and then, “I’m coming, okay? Honey, don’t do anything, just stay there in the apartment. I’m coming as quick as I can. Don’t do anything until I get there.”

“Muld—“ she chokes on a sob. “You’re coming?”

“Yeah,” he says, his voice gentler. “I’ve got a long drive, and it’s not safe for me to talk much longer, but I’m coming. Tell William I’m coming, okay? I love you.”

There’s crackling over the line, like the connection is unstable, like his voice could disappear at any moment, and it makes her desperate, makes her grip the phone tighter. “Mulder, I’m sorry,” she sniffs. “I couldn’t do it alone.”

Another hum and pulse of static, and his voice sounds more distant. “You did a good job,” he says. “Just wait for me.”

Scully nods, though she knows he can’t see it, and says into the phone, “I love you.” A second later the line goes dead and she isn’t sure if he’s heard her. She cradles the phone in her hands like a sacred and fragile thing: it gave her his voice in her ear after all these months. She looks at William on the bed and rubs her index finger along his cheek. “He’s coming back,” she tells him, and tries to make herself believe it.

—

She waits for two days, the tension of her need buzzing like a hive of bees, nerves frazzled, unwilling to put William down even for a few minutes. Monica offers to watch him while she showers, but Scully refuses. She tells Monica to go home and takes William into the bath with her, soaps them both up and tells him it won’t be long. “He’ll be here soon,” she whispers. The hours stretch like months, and the two of them wait alone behind locked doors.

Mulder’s wheels are on the road, somewhere in the world, spinning ever closer. That knowledge is the only thread that keeps her tethered to the world.

—

He drives a beat-up junker into Georgetown and feels terribly out of place. Mulder has grown scruff into an almost-beard that is streaked with small patches of gray. He wears oil-stained jeans and a hooded sweatshirt, but he enters under the cover of darkness in the hope that no one will notice him. It’s almost three in the morning. He brought practically nothing with him, but his back pocket holds a photo of William, his small pack the phone he used to call her. He’s home now. He sees her apartment and his heart slams in his chest.

_She’s a wreck, man. She’s not okay. Keeps talking about giving up the baby to keep him safe._ Frohike’s words had been like slow punches to the gut. How bad it had been for him in all these months—he never thought about how bad it could have been for her. For them.

Mulder lets himself into the building, quiet, and approaches her door. He prays that his family is on the other side. _Let them be there_ , he thinks. _Let them be okay_. He turns his key in the lock and pushes it open. “Scully?” A hushed call into the darkened apartment, but nothing. He locks the door behind him. Quiet, he moves through the dark to the bedroom door but finds it, too, locked.

“Scully,” he whispers again, taps the door three times. There’s nothing for a moment, so he tries again. “Scully?” A little louder this time. There’s rustling on the other side.

“Mulder?”

A wash of relief. “It’s me,” he says. “You okay? Can I come in?”

He hears a groan of furniture sliding—a dresser in front of the door? The lock turns, the door cracks open, and she’s standing there in yellow lamp light, holding their son, hair mussed from sleep. Her eyes go wide at his appearance—so different from when he left, he’s sure—and then her face gives way in a heartbreaking flood of relief. “Hi,” she manages, and then she falls against him, face pressed into his sweatshirt and crying already. He scoops them both to him, speechless, presses his face to her hair and breathes them in. His hands find her waist, then in her hair, then her shoulders so he can tip her back and see the baby, who has stirred and fussed and opened his eyes: still blue, like hers. He touches the baby’s face, his soft onesie.

It is too much for him. For her, too. They all crumple to the floor, a whole family of inconsolables, crying into each other and kissing cheeks and eyes and foreheads and fuzzy heads and scruffy beards and finally lips when he can’t stand it any longer because she’s just so beautiful and this is his _son_ and he’s missed them both so very much.

“I’m so sorry,” he says at last. “I shouldn’t have left you.”

She shakes her head, “No,” she says. “I should have been stronger.”

He also tells her _no_ , tells her she did just right. “You’re okay. We’re all okay. We’re together now,” he says. “We don’t separate again.“ His family: how could he have walked away? “I won’t go anywhere without you. Without both of you. We stay together.”

She wipes her face, buries it in his arm, kisses his bicep. “Yeah. Okay.”

Mulder scoops his hands under his son’s back and lifts the child up. “He’s gotten so _big_ ,” he says, taking in the boy’s solid weight, his chubby cheeks, his rather large head. “Look at the _noggin_ on this kid.”

Scully laughs, still swiping at her eyes.“That’s all you,” she says, smiling at him with a look that quickens his heart with the sheer volume of love in it. “The Scullys were petite babies.”

He gives her a look, like _even Bill?_ and she’s still smiling at him. It is his favorite thing. He cups her cheek, rubs his thumb at her temple.

William burbles a “Ya ya” and regards his father curiously, glancing now and then to Scully for reassurance. She boops his nose and whispers, “That’s daddy,” which makes Mulder’s breath hitch.

The baby presses his feet down in an _I-want-to-stand_ gesture, so Mulder grips him under the arms and lets his little feet press into the rug.The baby holds up his weight, satisfied, and shoves a fist into his mouth. “Strong,” Mulder says.

“Yeah. He wants to walk.”

Mulder left a squalling infant and came back to an almost-toddler, a little person forming his own personhood. He turns his gaze Scully, who’s watching them with a look he cannot name. “We’re okay now,” he tells her.

She holds his scruffy jaw with both her hands. “Thank you,” she says.

He leans in and kisses her mouth, rubs his nose against hers, drinks her in like he’s dying of thirst. “Let’s get in bed, hmm?” He finally says.

They close and lock the door. At her nervous look, he helps her push the dresser back in front of it. He strips his dirty jeans, worn hoodie, and they climb into the covers where they are three, quiet, entwined in warm sheets with William heavy on his chest.

“Tell me where you were,” she whispers.

Mulder breathes deep and kisses the top of her head. “Tomorrow,” he says.

She lays one hand on William’s back, her cheek on Mulder’s shoulder. “Okay.”

He watches her drift and, after some minutes, lets himself slip under too.

They’re not safe. They might not every be safe.

But they’re together.


End file.
